Soon to be entering the crowdfunding arena, the ZX Spectrum Next isn't merely a bluetooth keyboard.

It isn't even some aborted horror that looked like it was removed from Clive Sinclair's womb before being torched by a flamethrower. It's a genuine, brand new version of the old ZX Spectrum+. I think.

Here's what some guys have to say about it: "The Spectrum Next is a reimplementation of the original at hardware level, ensuring it runs all the software out there - old and new. And it's also compatible with most expansions made for the ZX Spectrum.

"Faster, more memory, new video modes, SD storage, HDMI output... It takes the Speccy to a whole new level. And it's totally open source, so the community can expand, improve and take it into the future."

Hey - HDMI output! That's my main issue with the Spectrum Vega dealt with. Nevertheless... this is something like the fourth recreated Spectrum to be announced or released in the last 12 months. Do we really need it? And more to the point... can I stoke sufficient indignation to sustain this opinion piece?

PLOT TWIST!Ha ha: you thought this was going to be an article about the ZX Spectrum Next! Don't feel too stupid; so did I, until I started writing it.

Because I realised... I don't actually know how much I care? I mean, strip away Digitiser2000, forget I moonlight as Mr Biffo, and would I actually give two nips? Or even one nip? And what's a nip anyway?

Is it a nipple? What do I mean by that? Why am I talking about nipples all of a sudden?

You'll have to excuse me. I woke up at 5.45am this morning, following a needlessly vivid dream in which I hacked away at the walls of a gingerbread house with a foot-long serrated knife.

Then there was a bit where I pulled a tapestry off the wall to see if it too was edible (it wasn't), and underneath was a banner supporting LGBT rights. At this point I announced, proudly, that it we were going to have "The first gay Oktoberfest in history!".

No, really. That's genuinely what I dreamt about last night.

Generally, I'm never one for sleepng in. Too much to do. Still, 5.45am is a little earlier than I'd usually start the day, but I thought it would be an opportunity to get ahead. Write some Digitiser, then get cracking with everything else I've got to do today.

As I write this, it's 8.38am. Since I woke up, I've been laying here in bed looking online for game-related topics that might provoke just enough flammable material for me to write something. And the closest I came was there being another ZX Spectrum remake. But do I care? And will exploring that question prove to be enough to get us to the end of this article?

Let's find out together!

ARTICLES OF FAITHThe reason I started this article is that I had a few people ask me if I was going to cover the Spectrum Next - presumably because I so loathed the Vega.

I mean, we all enjoyed me giving that a kicking, so why not repeat the show? It could be my new thing; stomping on every single remake of the Spectrum.

Unfortunately, there's not actually a lot to cover at the moment, regarding the Next. They've announced they'll be asking for crowdfunding pennies... and that's about it.

Still, let's say I had never brought Digitiser back. There's every possibility that I would've bought a ZX Spectrum Vega last year, even if I wasn't going to review it.

​There's every possibility that I'd have been as disappointed and annoyed by it in that parallel universe as I was in our world. No HDMI lead? Really?! See, even now that genuinely bugs me. The Next though...? I dunno. I could try and get annoyed by it, I suppose, though right now I'm more legitimately annoyed by the noise my neighbour is making; it sounds like he's vomiting repeatedly into a bucket.

But this is how opinion columns work on the whole; we have to go looking for things upon which we can form an opinion.

I don't want you thinking that I'm always manufacturing fake outrage. I don't know how other writers do it, but anything I've ever written on here was entirely sincere and congruent. I can't fake getting annoyed about something. Not these days. Perhaps in the past, but I've lost that ability. I need to write from a platform of honesty.

On the whole, I don't walk around in a rage, gnashing my teeth and waving my fist at shadows, but obviously there are things that matter to me, that provoke me, more than other things.

TIE A YELLOW RIBBON ROUND THE PROVOKE TREEAs far as games go - much to the disappointment of many of you - the endlessly repeating car crash that is Gamergate continues to be one of those topics. It's a poisoned chalice to write about, however. It has a huge impact on the site's hits for a couple of days, and then our readership drops off a cliff - as all the GGers and anti-GGers wander away... along with many of Digi's regulars, it seems.

​If I wanted Digi to become a huge site, with lots of juicy ad revenue and a Patreon fund that I could live off, all I'd have to do is tie my colours to the mast of one side or the other. Which, suffice to say, makes me suspicious of so many GG commentators. How much of their ire and alleged integrity is a business decision? From my perspective, GG would be great for revenue - after all, our donor fund has dropped a fair bit in recent months - but not so good for the soul.

Nintendo squandering its potential is something else I feel strongly about - because I love the Nintendo of old. Plus there are all sorts of things outside of gaming that I could easily write thousands of words about.

But let's look at what the ZX Spectrum Next is. It's some guys, who are having a crack at something they're probably quite passionate about, and hope they might make a few quid off. Do I think there are too many ZX Spectrum remakes on the market? Probably. Not least because I can play Spectrum games in my laptop browser.

Were it not for Digi... would I really care, though? They're not hurting anyone. If the Next flops, it's no skin off my snout. At the top of this piece, I tried... and failed utterly... to have any sort of concrete opinion on it.

ULTIMATE LEGENDAnd that's what this is piece is ultimately about, I realise.

Every time you get annoyed by a Katie Hopkins or a Piers Morgan... please question how much they would actually care, were they not paid to have opinions.

I'm not saying that Hopkins doesn't believe what she's saying. I actually think she does. Were she not writing for The Daily Mail, I could see her standing as an MP.

Most of her opinions are foul, and I suspect she exaggerates them to ensure maximum noise, but you can be certain that once she's submitted her copy, she just gets on with her day. It's the journalistic equivalent of letting off a firework in a henhouse, and walking away.

If Jim Sterling, or Totalbiscuit, or Anita Sarkeesian - to pluck a few prominent names entirely at random - writes something that annoys you, or stokes your ire, you're playing the role the mediasphere wants you to play. In a world dominated by voices and opinions, the only way you're going to stand out as one of those voices is to be louder, more outrageous, and more controversial than everyone else.

Better still if you can find those issues that you know are flashpoints - antisemitism, immigration, Gamergate...

Donald Trump is an absolute master of that audience manipulation. And cleverest of all, by keeping his message sufficiently vague, he casts his net as wide as possible. "Make America Great" is as meaningful as "Down with this sort of thing", yet it appeals to a general sense of dissatisfaction among certain parts of the American electorate. Two people might believe very different things, but Donald could be speaking to either of them.

His supporters can join in with him, by saying "Yeah! I'm angry too about some things, The Donald!". By giving voice to people who know they're angry - even if they can't articulate why - they boost his inarticulate kindergarten rhetoric exponentially.

As an aside, I want to believe he doesn't stand a chance in the general election, but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate him.

PUPPET MASTERSSo what am I saying? I'm saying it's worth thinking next time you read an angry opinion piece, and you get angry too. Are you just being played?

​Before you storm onto the comments section or Twitter, ask yourself what you're really angry about. Have you simply been wound up and unleashed to parrot somebody else's insincere wrath through your own filter? Were your buttons pressed? Are you contributing to the debate, or simply fuelling it?

And had you not read that opinion piece, alerting you to the latest outrage, how would your day have been impacted by the issue...?

​More to the point: what about that ZX Spectrum Next, eh? Utter pile of shite.

This is outrageous. I AM OUTRAGED. Why don't any of these speccy remakes come with a tape deck?

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Dr Kank

5/5/2016 09:54:43 am

I am outraged at the blatant Spectrum bias on this website. There's a new Commodore 64 coming out, but you wouldn't know of it from reading Digitiser 2000. I'm going to write to my MP to complain, while also sending her a death threat to keep her on her toes.

Hello! I was at Play Expo at the weekend when Henrique Olifiers (of Surgeon Simulator fame) announced the ZX Spectrum Next - to spontaneously applause from all the Spectrum devotees in the room.

It certainly seems to have a lot of love put into it - it's even been designed by the same guy who made the original Spectrum. It's basically a Spectrum with all of the extra add-ons that have been developed by enthusiasts in Russia and Brazil, and with all the expansion ports you could ever wish for. Including an HDMI port, natch.

Looks like it's more aimed at the coding enthusiast rather than your average punter...

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Superbeast 37

5/5/2016 10:46:02 am

I think it's wrong putting Totalbiscuit in with that crowd.

He is very much anti drama/bait and having previously tried to play the "calm voice" and "let's get around the table and talk about it" role, he has now decided that the best option is to refuse to even discuss dramas.

Not sure how well that will work for his view numbers...

He doesn't pull his punches in critique but he doesn't do that to generate outrage and drama.

Sorry to focus in on one sentence in an article (overall I agree with most of what you've written here) but I find it disingenuous to compare Jim Sterling and Anita Sarkeesian. Jim makes a living off drumming up outrage. He drums it up massively and, with heavy irony, builds his stage persona around a fascist giving impassioned speeches to the masses. He has a new topic to be outraged about every week and regularly tries to drag up old targets as well to keep the hatred fresh so he can sell tshirts that say "fuck konami" on them.

While Anita has undoubtedly profited from outrage by gaining more exposure, she doesn't attempt to drum it up. She made a modest Kickstarter that blew up after it caught the ire of some eejits. She then took time to make carefully written and considered videos that are delivered in the most calm voice possible, bordering on milquetoast. Her critiques are the simplest most introductory babies first feminism. They are not designed to elicit outrage, they just have generated it because there's a large portion of people willing to explode on the drop of the hat. And her social media accounts are mostly very formal and just posting things like new videos and interviews and related projects.

Jim bathes in outrage and his media presence is very reactionary and based around causing outrage. Anita calmly states her opinions and outrage is thrown at her saying she wants to censor video games despite the fact that literally the first video in the series starts with a disclaimer saying it's fine to enjoy something and be critical of it at the same time.

lol I know you're sick of gamergate but sorry putting Anita in with outrage mongering to me is just factually wrong (I know there's plenty of people who will *heavily* disagree with me on that). There's an entire cottage industry made of people being outraged and counter-outraged over her and she has gotten an absurd amount of exposure over it but IMO she just doesn't fan the flames herself in the same way other people you mentioned in the article do.

And when someone is _WRONG ON THE INTERNET_ is is my solemn duty to waste my time and yours writing comments about it

Mr Biffo

5/5/2016 11:20:57 am

It was more a plea for people to think for themselves, I guess. Not for a second comparing anyone to Katie Hopkins. God forbid!

TBH maybe it doesn't apply to TB either I dunno never really paid attention to him because looking at options menus makes me fall asleep.

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Mr Biffo

5/5/2016 11:46:52 am

Yes, somebody already said that. I was generalising.

Superbeast 37

5/5/2016 11:47:39 am

The rigging/sensationalist salacious twisting of the Hitman footage and the comments at E3 last year (where I feel she went too far and lost a lot of cred even with her supporters) certainty suggests that she is no better than a Sterling.

That and leaping on things like mass shootings and using it to push an agenda whilst the bodies are still warm.

Indeed I'd compare her to Trump. They both make statements that can often be factually proven (but miss the point) but are crafted to provoke a response. I think they are both smart in that respect. Yeah they rely on others blowing it up but they can't play innocent on the bait issue!

The hitman thing comes up so much and is so wrong I have a prewritten response.

http://seamusaran.tumblr.com/post/133951610992/the-hitman-argument

Superbeast 37

5/5/2016 11:57:16 am

It is not wrong. She made VERY specify claims about manipulating the bodies of the women.

They aren't open to interpretation or debate. It was crystal clear. It was a deliberate attempt to mislead and rile up gender activists who knew no better and rile up those that did know better.

Superbeast 37

5/5/2016 12:02:37 pm

"players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual characters. It's a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality"

No they are not meant to. Dunno what perverts she has been talking to...

Kendall9000

5/5/2016 05:53:13 pm

This reminds me of people who argued that Mary Whitehouse was just a nice Christian lady with a few reasonable criticisms of the media - people who thought she was a moral panic pushing zealot were simply misinterpreting her perfectly understandable concerns.

If Sarkeesian's puritanical scaremongering and collectivist radical feminist views are really "milquetoast" and "babies first feminism", that says a lot about the ideology modern feminism has turned into...

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Random Reviewr

12/5/2016 01:48:08 pm

I'd agree that Anita's stuff is 101 level femminism. I think it also fails to meet those basic standards, willfully misrepresents the work of artists and passes off a narrow and bigoted form off feminism as the norm.

I know if you're an Anita fan she can do no wrong but her Hitman critique is pretty loathsome in how it distorts reality to force her point. This isnt an isolated incident. Look at her Timesplitters Future Perfect piece. Anita claims that a specific incident is an example of the damsel in distress trope but it is actually a PARODY of said trope. Its even more obvious if you'd played the rest of the game which is an Ott mocking of action movie stereotypes. It doesn't further these tropes because the player is in on the joke and is laughing at how silly they are. Either she has failed to adequately research her topic or she is being selective to the point of manipulation when making her points. Either way, her work desrves to be held to scrutiny.

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Keith

5/5/2016 11:54:29 am

I'm so, so glad I'm not a teenager into video games now. Knowing myself I suspect I would have got drawn into one side or another, and not necessarily based on the wisest foundations.

As an adult, while I do dip into the articles on GG, it's almost a relief to think "I have no opinion on this. I think I'm pretty sound in terms of my own ethics/not being sexist etc, so let them who want to get on with it, get on with it"

If I've learned anything from the last year or so, it's that everything is about it. Everything. And not even in games. Even the newspapers I read seem to bring it up for no reason in basically unrelated articles. There is no escape.

I have no idea what this article was about... I think someone hid Biffo's special brain medicine from him today.

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Mr Biffo

5/5/2016 12:28:33 pm

"Stream-of-consciousness" is the phrase you're looking for.

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stoo

5/5/2016 12:44:24 pm

If I was to have a dedicated retro-gaming machine I'd rather take something like a Raspberry PI or a JXD S7800B and load it up with emulators. Then I could play games for any 8\16 bit computer or console. Don't see so much appeal in buying a new device that locks you into a single format.

That, er, wasn't really the point of this article, I realise.

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Clive Peppard

5/5/2016 12:49:09 pm

Is Katie Hopkins the Kraken?

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Euphemia

5/5/2016 01:24:36 pm

That this here Digitiser STILL doesn't come with a cover-mounted cassette is a DISGRACE. It was bad enough in the day, when it wasn't ejected from the VCR daily, but is unforgivable now.

FORSHAME!

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Minglefingler

5/5/2016 04:25:21 pm

I once slaughtered the intellectual class of a developing nation so that I could write an opinion piece on how I was outraged by this terrible crime against humanity. It was heartfelt, passionate stuff. The raw humanity of the text was tear-jerking without descending into mawkish sentimentality. I scribbled this wonderful diatribe on my last piece of toilet paper and soon after developed a startling case of the runs. What a waste of time.

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Picston Shottle

5/5/2016 04:31:40 pm

Opinion pieces are just that - opinions. I find it hard to get riled by any opinion that is contrary to my own, to be honest. Yes, some opinions are abhorrent, but that is a reflection of the general twattery of the person espousing that opinion, And before anybody gets all self righteous and starts screaming about me being an Nazi apologist, you can fuck right off! Yes, some opinions and views need to, and must be, challenged, but they are real issues. Not Gamer Gate, though, which is a monstrous pile of shite. Get over it - all the he said/she said bullshit is tiresome and in no way impacts the development, sale and enjoyment of video games. We're still listening to music and going to the cinema, and these same GG debate has been raging around these other two multi billion dollar industries forever. So, ya know, when the games industry implodes/explodes (depending on which side of the GG fence you're sitting) please call me out on it and tell me I was wrong. But I expect that, maybe due to the billions of dollars involved, it won't.

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Stuart

5/5/2016 04:48:30 pm

I think you raise a good point here, Biffo. In your neutral outlook on GG and other, political forms of opinion and consensus formation, you express valuable, measured warnings about the power of emotionalism and being drawn into things to the point where you can't really see what's going on.

I know many here (including yourself) approach GG with a sense of trepidation, but personally I find your pieces the most productive in terms of unbiased reportage and fair, yet personally honest, commentary. Also, when things get too boggy, there's the wonderful carnival of Digi humour with which to cool things down. I can't think of any other outlet that has as rich a history as Digi's to draw upon. I enjoy the GG-related pieces and discussions here, but I stay for the other stuff too. Even the bits about possums and faeces.

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ChorltonWheelie

5/5/2016 09:51:45 pm

Read that in Ken Livingstone's voice.

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Paulvw

5/5/2016 07:00:21 pm

Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back again

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Gilberry

5/5/2016 10:27:27 pm

Bloody Hell Biffo
You may have almost convinced me that Paul Dacre is doing a service to most of mankind (and certainly the UK) by keeping the Hopkins out of parliament.

Enough Blonde haired publicity seeking MPs who will do anything and 'support' any cause if it increases their opportunity for power.